Mentoring and Reporting Research: A Concern for Aesthetics.
Saved in:
| Title: | Mentoring and Reporting Research: A Concern for Aesthetics. |
|---|---|
| Language: | English |
| Authors: | Alvermann, Donna E., Hruby, George G. |
| Source: | Reading Research Quarterly. Jan-Mar 2000 35(1):46-63. |
| Peer Reviewed: | Y |
| Page Count: | 18 |
| Publication Date: | 2000 |
| Document Type: | Journal Articles Reports - Research |
| Descriptors: | Data Interpretation, Higher Education, Interprofessional Relationship, Mentors, Preservice Teacher Education, Professional Development, Reading Teachers, Research Methodology |
| ISSN: | 0034-0553 |
| Abstract: | Presents results of 2 studies on mentoring teacher educators in literacy education. Models alternative ways of representing and evaluating research data. Articulates how these alternative forms of representing data capture the aesthetics of mentoring graduate students in literacy teacher education. Describes the quantitative survey study, qualitative site visits, and the interpretive rationale for attending to aesthetics in reporting research. (RS) |
| Notes: | Special Issue: Envisioning the Future of Literacy. |
| Journal Code: | CIJJUL2000 |
| Entry Date: | 2000 |
| Accession Number: | EJ598974 |
| Database: | ERIC |
|
Full text is not displayed to guests.
Login for full access.
|
|
| FullText | Links: – Type: pdflink Url: https://content.ebscohost.com/cds/retrieve?content=AQICAHj0k_4E0hTGH8RJwT4gCJyBsGNe_WN95AvKlDbXJGqwxwFr3-xhrGnbuWl0j1ldI0pLAAAA4TCB3gYJKoZIhvcNAQcGoIHQMIHNAgEAMIHHBgkqhkiG9w0BBwEwHgYJYIZIAWUDBAEuMBEEDCGFA1hnwysDc76WPwIBEICBmflN6c582xl0GgurUrYA0JtkESjOs_A7mUuoQ6jTRKmEoMEjiY_T5gbnDKZ-HCgta-fN78ynkCN-krUOwz0kVJmGmSbV6RzEvqSaJJoS_Zt1Su5xErFfn4OwIhiclPz2bPsbTEjnHAk5UL8uF9VcpioeDfzRRA5OaigIdXIgck7gJYZGvTxwjfCRbm-2mwCo5mF3JSCOpxAUHQ== Text: Availability: 1 Value: <anid>AN0002765713;RRQ01JAN.00;2000Feb23.17:09;v4.1</anid> <title id="AN0002765713-1">MENTORING AND REPORTING RESEARCH: A CONCERN FOR AESTHETICS </title> <sbt id="AN0002765713-2">ABSTRACTS</sbt> <hd id="AN0002765713-3"> Mentoring and reporting research: A concern for aesthetics </hd> <p>In this article we present the results of two studies on the mentoring of teacher educators in literacy education, and model alternative ways of representing and evaluating research data. The first study is based on a survey of North American teacher educators and their beliefs about how they were mentored as students and how they in turn mentor their graduate advisees. The data from this first study are presented as a traditional quantitative analysis. The second study is a report of six site visits to institutional locations across North America where in-depth interviews were conducted with seven professors of literacy teacher education and their current advisees. In keeping with the interpretive practices of one such professor whose site visit we selected to illustrate these practices, the write-up of said location is crafted as an aesthetic narrative. Our method of writing over one another's site visit data is also illustrated. We close by articulating how these alternative forms of representing data capture the aesthetics of mentoring graduate students in literacy teacher education. In the spirit of modeling these new forms, we structure the paper as a whole with the trope of the triptych, a presentational art form adapted from a previous millennium that takes the form of three illustrative panels hinged together to tell a story. In our triptych, the first panel is the quantitative survey study, the second panel our qualitative site visits, and the third our interpretive rationale for attending to aesthetics in reporting research on mentoring in literacy teacher education. Explanatory hinges hold the text together and facilitate the transition between panels. </p> <p>The purpose of this article is to experiment with alternative forms for reporting research on mentoring in literacy teacher education. The article will unfold in three parts. Each part constitutes a panel, as in a triptych, a presentational art form illustrated graphically in Figure 1, figuratively in Figure 2, and operationally in the article as a whole. The first panel is a report, written in the conventional manner, of an international mail survey on graduate student mentoring in literacy teacher education. </p> <p>The second panel is a summary report of six follow-up site visits to the survey, one of which is textually staged in a narrative form that allows us to model the efficacy of taking aesthetics into account when writing up qualitative data.Here, we use aesthetics to refer generally to "the branch of philosophy dealing with art, its creative sources, its forms, and its effects" (Webster's New World Dictionary of American English, 1991, p. 22), and in particular, to several fictive techniques for representing our data. </p> <p>The third panel consists of our reflections on the modeling process that we used to blur the lines between art and social science in reporting our research on mentoring in literacy teacher education; it also includes a discussion of what we gained (and risked) in the process of experimenting with fictive techniques in reporting that research, and our reasons for believing that such experimentation will become increasingly more prevalent in the 21st century. Hinges hold the panels together by serving as transitions from one section of the report to the next. These hinges also convey our commentary on the need to find more readable and aesthetically pleasing ways to report research in the new millennium. </p> <p>We begin the article by situating graduate-level mentoring, as it now exists, in the context of literacy teacher education. Following this brief introduction, we move into our tripartite description that includes the mentoring mail survey, the six follow-up site visits, and our reflections on the need for attending to aesthetics when reporting research on mentoring in the future. </p> <hd id="AN0002765713-4">Mentoring in literacy teacher education: An introduction</hd> <p>Although a large body of research exists on mentoring in general, that which pertains to mentoring in the academy is quite modest by comparison (Luna &amp; Cullen, 1995; Merriam, 1983; Mullen, Cox, Boettcher, &amp; Adoue, 1997). Moreover, a review of the literature on academic mentoring suggests that knowledge about literacy teacher educators' perceptions of what constitutes successful mentoring relationships between faculty and graduate students is virtually uncharted territory (Alvermann &amp; Hruby, 1998). </p> <p>Of the studies that do exist in literacy teacher education, Stansell's (1997) autobiographical account of his journey from graduate student to professor is fairly representative, as is Young and Alvermann's (1997) account of the more situation-specific mentoring relationships that develop around writing a dissertation. While these and similar reports (Belcher, 1994; Kemp, 1997; Wiseman, 1997) have begun to provide some of the substance and detail necessary for understanding how mentoring occurs within literacy teacher education, they do not go far enough. For as Mullen and Cox (1997) have noted, and we agree, "little research has been undertaken on how mentoring relationships develop, endure, die, or change over time" (p. xxi). We know little about the special ties that evolve over time between mentors and those who are mentored. </p> <p>Some academics view mentoring as a developmental process (Luna &amp; Cullen, 1995); others view it as a gendered (Heinrich, 1995), raced (hooks, 1990), or classed (Tokarczyk &amp; Fay, 1997) practice; while still others see it as a liberating and empowering pedagogy (Freire, 1997; Macedo, 1997). Regardless of the stance taken, a common goal of most graduate-level mentoring programs is to help advisees achieve a sufficiently high level of autonomy in their professional lives (Blankemeyer &amp; Weber, 1996). </p> <p>However, we personally are persuaded by Kegan's (1982) view that adulthood is characterized less by autonomy and more by interdependence. Thus, in designing our survey of mentoring relationships in literacy teacher education, we drew from Kegan; specifically, we asked questions that would allow us to tap the interdependent nature of such relationships. For instance, we asked respondents to recall their own experiences as graduate student advisees in terms of how those experiences had influenced their current relationships with graduate advisees, how long they had been in the profession, what kind (if any) contact they maintained with their former mentors, what they perceived their own advisees would say about their mentoring style, and so on. </p> <hd id="AN0002765713-5">Panel 1: The mail survey of mentoring in literacy teacher education</hd> <p>The purpose of the survey was to identify literacy teacher education mentors' perceptions of what characterizes a successful mentor-mentee relationship. We defined mentors as dissertation or thesis advisors (referred to in some institutions as major professors) and mentees as the doctoral- or master's-level students these advisors serve. We (a female major professor/male doctoral student dyad) are an example of this type of mentoring relationship. As coauthors of the survey, we brought different concerns to its development. These concerns were reflected in the type and content of the survey questions. </p> <hd1 id="AN0002765713-6"> Design and methods </hd1> <p>The survey design, data collection, and analysis followed standard, recommended procedures for mail surveys (Fowler, 1993; Mangione, 1995). These procedures were directed and coordinated by professionals in the Survey Research Center (SRC) at the University of Georgia. The SRC staff also provided advice about constructing and formatting the 41 closed-item survey, which comprised multiple-choice questions and 4-point rating scales. Three of the items offered respondents an opportunity to explain the category "other." Space was also allocated at the end of the survey for additional comments. The 41 items were derived from a review of the literature on mentoring and from focus group interviews that George Hruby conducted at the National Reading Conference. After piloting the survey to determine the clarity of its directions and questions, we revised it in accordance with the suggested changes. </p> <p>We used a simple random sampling procedure (Fowler, 1993) in drawing from a population of literacy teacher educators listed in the latest edition of the International Reading Association's (1995) Graduate Programs and Faculty in Reading. Addresses in this list were updated using membership information from three other professional reading organizations (National Reading Conference, College Reading Association, and American Reading Forum). From a final list of 2,200 reading teacher educators, 500 were randomly selected to receive the survey. Using a two-wave mailing, we received 249 usable surveys (excluding those received after the cut-off date), which produced a response rate of 49.8%--an acceptable value for mail surveys according to Kalton (1983) and Mangione (1995). The sampling margin of error was calculated as being no greater than +/-6.0%, a value that permits generalizing from the sample to the population (Fowler, 1993). However, when interpreting the results of this survey, it is important to bear in mind the limitations of self-report data. </p> <hd1 id="AN0002765713-7"> Analysis and results </hd1> <p>Frequencies for the 41-item survey were run on 249 cases using the program MVS SAS Release 6.08. Indepen dent sample chi-square tests were performed for the purpose of investigating differences in responses based on the following variables: the mentor's sex category, length of time spent mentoring at the graduate level, type of advisee (master's or doctoral level) that the mentor had in mind when responding to the survey, and type of relationship (ongoing or not) that the mentor had with her or his own mentor. </p> <p>Profiles of respondents. Given the subject pool that the respondents represented, there were few surprises. A little less than half the respondents (45%) had 15 or more years' experience mentoring graduate students; 40.5% had between 5 and 15 years' experience; and 14.5% had less than 5 years' experience. There was no statistically significant difference in survey return rates between females (56.6%) and males (42.6%). When asked if they responded to the survey questions with mainly doctoral- or master's-level students in mind, 46.6% of the respondents said doctoral, 30.9% said master's, and 20.5% said both (5 missing cases). Over half (54.2%) said they answered the questions with both male and female graduate students in mind; 44.2% said female only, and 0.4% said male only (3 missing cases). Over half (57.0%) of the respondents said that they had maintained routine, ongoing relationships with their mentors from their own doctoral programs. </p> <p>Nature of mentoring relationships. The analysis of the frequency data showed that 41.7% of the respondents claimed to model their mentoring "somewhat closely" on the relationship they had with their own mentor, and 40.4% said they modeled it "very closely"; 11.6% said they "did not model it very closely"; and 3.4% said they "did not model it at all" on what they had experienced as advisees (4 missing cases). Of the respondents, 43.2% claimed that their mentor was the most important source of their mentoring knowledge, as compared with others who named the primary source to be what they knew about human relations in general (39.7%), a professor other than their mentor (8.9%), the professional literature (1.4%), or another graduate student (0.6%) (9 missing cases). </p> <p>As a group, the respondents looked positively upon themselves as mentors and on the supportive role they played in relating to their advisees. For example, when asked to choose a metaphor that would best describe how they perceived themselves as mentors, 38.6% chose "role model" as the preferred descriptor; another 37.3% chose "coach." Other less frequently chosen metaphors included "consultant" (6.8%), "director" (6.0%), "sculptor" (5.6%), "critic" (2.4%), and "benevolent slave driver" (1.6%) (4 missing cases). In response to how they supported their advisees, 54.2% of respondents said "by showing confidence in them," 30.1% "by being accessible to them," 6.8% "by being a good listener," and 6.4% "by affirming their advisees' self-worth" (6 missing cases). </p> <p>The respondents were equally positive in their perceptions of how their advisees would describe them as mentors. Over 70% of the respondents agreed that the following traits would be seen as "very true" about themselves: that they were demanding of themselves (82.3%), that they were supportive and affirming (77.5%), and that they were honest and frank (73.9%). Finally, the respondents believed similar attributes were necessary in their advisees if a mentoring relationship were to succeed. For example, the respondents were in agreement over 70% of the time that the following were "very true" about successful advisees: they were committed and willing to work hard (90.4%), they were able to take constructive criticism (83.1%), they were resilient (72.7%), and they were open and willing to lay things on the table (71.9%). </p> <p>Perceived differences according to sex category. A statistically significantly greater number of female mentors than male mentors (X<sups>2, sub (1)</sups> = 11.65, p &lt;.001) perceived that their advisees would say it was "very true" that they were demanding of themselves. Similarly, female mentors (X<sups>2, sub (1)</sups> = 4.34, p &lt;.05), statistically significantly more so than male mentors, perceived that their advisees would say it was "very true" that they were demanding of others (especially students). At the same time, statistically significantly more female than male mentors perceived that their advisees would say it was "very true" that they were supportive/affirming (X<sups>2, sub (1)</sups>=5.93, p &lt;.05) and positive/ optimistic (X<sups>2, sub (1)</sups> = 7.17, p &lt;.05) in their relationships with students. In terms of working with their advisees to help them improve their writing, female mentors, statistically significantly more so than male mentors (X2 (<reflink idref="bib1" id="ref1">1</reflink>)=9.59, p &lt;.005), perceived that students would say this was "very true" of them. Finally, a statistically significantly greater number of female mentors than male mentors (X<sups>2, sub (1)</sups> = 13.12, p &lt;.001) perceived that their advisees would say it was "very true" that they were role models for the students. </p> <p>Perceived differences according to advisee type. Mentors who reported answering the survey with only doctoral students in mind, statistically significantly more so than those answering with master's and a mix of master's and doctoral students in mind (X<sups>2, sub (1)</sups> = 4.30, p &lt;.05), perceived that their advisees would say it was "very true" that they were role models for the students. When mentors answered with only master's-level advisees in mind (as opposed to doctoral and a mix of master's and doctoral students), they were statistically significantly (X<sups>2, sub (1)</sups> = 4.73, p &lt;.05) more apt to perceive it was "very true" that their advisees viewed them as working with students to improve their writing. Perceived differences according to ongoing relationship with mentor. Mentors who had ongoing relationships with mentors from their own doctoral programs, statistically significantly more so than those without such relationships (X<sups>2, sub (1)</sups> = 9.16, p &lt;.01), reported they believed it was "very important" that students whom they mentored be able to teach them something (keep them abreast of new developments in the field). Similarly, respondents who had on going relationships with their own mentors, statistically significantly more so than those who did not (X<sups>2, sub (1)</sups> = 7.39, p &lt;.025), reported they perceived that students whom they mentored would say it was "very true" that they (the professors) were role models for the students. Finally, a statistically significantly greater number of male mentors than female mentors (X<sups>2, sub (1)</sups> = 6.30, p &lt;.025) described ongoing relationships with their own mentors from their doctoral programs as excellent; females were less laudatory in their descriptions of those relationships. </p> <hd1 id="AN0002765713-8"> Discussion of findings </hd1> <p>What do these findings tell us that we did not know before? We know, first, that mentoring does indeed go on throughout the literacy teacher education profession. Although there is little research to support this finding in the existing literature, the idea that mentoring has continued across generations suggests we are dealing with a natural phenomenon, a propensity for a particular set of social behaviors, a regular pattern, what dynamical theorists would call an attractor state (Bar-Yam, 1997; Clark, 1997). We stress, however, that these regular structures are not due to any essential nature shared among literacy teacher educators, but rather to the inclination of human agents to transact and self-organize in these fashions, given the prevailing ecological constraints. </p> <p>Second, we know that mentoring in literacy teacher education is perceived mostly as role modeling and coaching. According to an organizational theory of mentoring advanced by Kram (1985) and applied to higher education (Luna &amp; Cullen, 1995), role modeling serves a psychosocial function while coaching serves a career function. This distinction, as outlined by Luna and Cullen (1995), holds that "career functions permit the protege to acquire new knowledge and to grow within the organizational structure...[whereas] psychosocial functions advance a growing trust and intimacy...by providing enhanced identity, continuing support, and the sharing of dilemmas" (p. 21). Theoretically, the beginning phases of mentoring are most closely aligned with career functions, and the later phases with psychosocial functions, although there is room for interchanges between the two. That we did not find the respondents in our study making a distinction between the two functions may have been due more to the way we posed the questions than to any flaw in the theory. </p> <p>Third, we know that mentors draw their understanding of mentoring from their own experiences in being mentored, and that many literacy professionals have ongoing relationships with their own mentors, even as they mentor others. Researchers from fields outside teacher education have reported similar findings. For example, in two surveys of academics in business (Allen, Russell, &amp; Maetzke, 1997) and management-related fields (Ragins &amp; Cotton, 1993), it was found that satisfaction with previous mentoring experiences predicted a willingness to use those experiences as a basis for mentoring others in the future. In another survey of 400 scholars in the social, physical, and natural sciences, Grant and Ward (1992) found that professors who perceived they were mentored well became mentors earlier in their careers than did those who reported a less satisfactory experience. </p> <p>Finally, we know that sex category, advisee type, and the nature of a mentor's relationship with his or her own mentor made a difference in the perceptions our respondents had of themselves. For example, we know that female mentors in literacy teacher education, more so than their male counterparts, perceived their advisees viewed them as demanding, yet supportive and optimistic. This finding is supported, at least partially, by McQuillen and Ivy (1985) who found that female graduate students who chose female mentors reported higher levels of stress associated with a demanding attitude than did women who chose male mentors. That female mentors in our study perceived their advisees viewed them as more demanding than male mentors might be interpreted to mean that the women sensed they project a certain assertiveness that others notice. Alternatively, it might be argued from an essentialist perspective (see Belenky, Clinchy, Goldberger, &amp; Tarule, 1986) that the female mentors were more demanding of themselves and their female advisees because they intuitively knew what it takes to compete and succeed in a male-dominated academy. This latter interpretation (If you can't beat them, join them) ignores what Stalker (1994) has argued, and we agree, is the potential for women to resist and transform hierarchical structures that work to their disadvantage. It also ignores Brodkey's (1989) notion of discursive resistance, a term she uses to describe the feminist practice of giving agency to certain stereotypes (e.g., the assertive or demanding female) for the express purpose of gaining a foothold in a discourse that is least committed to preserving that stereotype. </p> <hd1 id="AN0002765713-9"> Hinge </hd1> <p>Although several findings from our survey of literacy teacher educators' perceptions of the mentoring process were supported in the larger literature on mentoring in the academy, we were limited in what interpretations we could draw from a data set devoid of any students' voices. To compensate at least partially for this missing student perspective, we did six follow-up site visits in which we interviewed several graduate advisees and the professors with whom they worked. Below, we describe the follow-up study and then provide a summary of its findings across all six sites. We conclude with an example of how we narratively wrote over each other's interpretations of these findings in an effort to provide an aesthetically enriched picture of mentoring in literacy teacher education at the turn of the millennium. </p> <p>We also use this narrative staging of the data as a means of experimenting with ways to blur the lines between art and social science. We believe that the use of aesthetic narrative forms in reporting research on mentoring in literacy teacher education creates openings through which partial understandings between the researchers and the researched can be glimpsed. In this kind of report writing, "the arguments are implicit; the words at the surface are meant only to trigger memories, images, common experiences, viewpoints left for dead" (Yukman, 1997, p. 169). Absent from the aesthetic narrative are the linear and smoothed out themes that currently mark a piece as qualitative or naturalistic in form. </p> <p>As other forms of more readable and aesthetically pleasing ways to report research continue to emerge in the 21st century, we believe they will enhance but not supplant the conventional grids of scholarly writing now in place. And this is as it should be, no doubt. It is enough if these new forms successfully fragment what Lather (1991) has called the "univocal authority" (p. 21) of texts, that is, texts bent on supporting and proving rather than vivifying. Finally, we believe there will be room in the next millennium for writing up data in ways that construct and reconstruct meaning many times over"multiple accounts [that] splinter the dogmatism of a single tale" (Grumet, 1991, p. 72). It is toward this end that we experiment here. </p> <hd id="AN0002765713-10">Panel 2: The six site visits</hd> <p>We selected the six sites with the following criteria in mind: diversity in terms of mission, size (large land grant, Ivy League, small liberal arts university), and geographic location. Once these criteria were met, we invited professors in literacy teacher education (in the United States and Canada) to participate and to involve a small group of graduate students in the interviews. The following professors agreed to participate: Vivian Gadsden (University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia), Judith Green and Carol Dixon (University of California at Santa Barbara), Jerome Harste (Indiana University, Bloomington), James Hoffman (University of Texas at Austin), Nancy Nelson Spivey (Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge), and Dennis Sumara (Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia). </p> <p>Thirty-one graduate students (27 women and 4 men) also agreed to participate but are not listed by name in accordance with the policies of the University of Georgia's Institutional Review Board on student participation. (The professors' names are used because each has appeared, or will appear in the near future, as copresenters with us on programs at various professional meetings.) </p> <p>Face-to-face meetings with the six literacy professors and their graduate advisees provided opportunities to explore in greater depth what we had learned about the mentoring process from the mail survey. Specifically, wewondered what mentoring in literacy teacher education looked like in actual practice. Although the survey data indicated that most professors viewed themselves as role models or coaches when it came to mentoring master's- and doctoral-level students, we wondered how (or if) those descriptors would play out on the different campuses we planned to visit. </p> <hd1 id="AN0002765713-11"> Interview methods </hd1> <p>A series of individual and group interviews were conducted at each site over a period of several days. The individual interviews ranged in length from slightly over an hour to more than 3 hours. Each was fully transcribed. The group interviews, which included both the professor and students, lasted approximately an hour. Following Briggs (1986) and Nespor and Barber (1995), we consciously avoided a standard set of questions in pursuing what we hoped would be a more naturalistic approach to discovering how the professors and students defined the mentoring process, if indeed that is what they called it. </p> <p>We began each interview by asking a broad question, such as "So, how would you describe what is going on here in terms of your relationship to ----" (the graduate students' names if the professor was being interviewed; the professor's name if the students [either individually or in small groups] were being interviewed). Like Nespor and Barber, in phrasing our follow-up questions we tried to avoid forcing people to fit their experiences into any preconceived notions of the mentoring process. This approach to interviewing worked well, especially because the professors at two of the six sites rejected the term mentoring altogether. </p> <p>Of the six group interviews, four were videotaped. We used the tapes and our field notes to construct viewing guides. These guides contextualized the content that each of us thought was relevant from the taped interviews. They also included questions that we posed to each other in terms of the larger data set (the mail survey and findings from the other site visits). For example, Hruby wrote the following in a guide that he prepared for Alvermann to use in viewing the tape made of a group interview at Indiana University: </p> <p>Alex (all graduate students' names have been changed) speaks of Harste's model of revision and reconsideration. Jessica says it's more than a model; it allows others entree into the community. Keeping minds open; allowing multiple and evolving perspectives--Harste talks of these in his individual interview as well. This [discussion] leads easily into the theme of multiple mentoring--which we have encountered elsewhere--and is picked up by Kathryn. Did you [Alvermann] find this theme of community/peer/group mentoring at your sites? </p> <p>We met to discuss our written responses to the viewing guides and to note where there were linkages between those responses and the survey data. The viewing guides, the questions on the guides, and our responses to them became another layer of data that we entered into the final analysis. We also sent copies of all transcripts to the people we interviewed and requested that they check them for accuracy and potentially sensitive material. In three instances the participants asked us to delete some sensitive wording from their particular transcripts, which we did. </p> <hd1 id="AN0002765713-12"> Data analysis </hd1> <p>Analyzing the data involved rereading all of the transcripts a number of times for different purposes. Initially, we made notes in the margins of the transcripts that provided a context for the actual interview. We also underlined or highlighted key ideas that provided some insight into how the participants perceived the mentoring process. Then, we met to discuss these insights. When we noted certain patterns in the interview data, we reread the survey findings to see if similar patterns existed there. If so, this was noted and taken into account in subsequent analyses. </p> <p>We read the transcripts again as we prepared the viewing guides and then attempted to answer each other's questions about the group interview data.Next, we met to triangulate the data from the transcripts, our field notes, and the viewing guides. Following that, we wrote full-length narratives of each site visit. Alvermann used a conventional approach (Polkinghorne, 1988) to report the data in narrative form, while Hruby used a variety of fictive representational forms (Denzin, 1997). We exchanged narratives, read each other's interpretations, and then wrote another narrative (each according to her or his own style of writing) that took into account the original writer's interpretation of the data. </p> <p>Writing over each other's interpretations in this manner generated some new insights that figured into the final step of our analytic process--a crosssite analysis. Looking across sites for common patterns yielded several findings, three of which are captured in the following summary. The site visit findings are condensed here in order to make room for an example of how we wrote over each other's interpretations of the interviews conducted at Simon Fraser University with Sumara and four of his graduate advisees. </p> <hd1 id="AN0002765713-13"> Summary of the site visit findings </hd1> <p>One thing we learned from the site visits, which was not visible in the survey findings, was that the term mentor evoked quite different meanings among the people we interviewed. For example, Green and Dixon disliked the term mentor because they viewed it as a synonym for authority. In interviews with Green, Dixon, and their advisees, it was clear that they saw authority as being socially constructed by the group--a concept somewhat at odds with the meaning of mentor, at least as it is typically used. Said to have originated in Greek mythology when Mentor, a trusted friend of the absent Odysseus, was left in charge of educating Odysseus's son (American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 1996), the term mentor is most often associated with one-on-one guidance. Like Green and Dixon, Hoffman also objected to the term as a descriptor for how he interacted with his advisees. Hoffman viewed mentoring as being concerned more with awakening a student's intellectual curiosity than with advising or counseling. In his words, "mentoring is not a self-descriptor but rather something students say about what is done for them." </p> <p>Although the other four professors we interviewed did not express strong disagreement with the use of the term mentor, they were careful to point out the differences they saw in their definition of mentoring and how they perceived the term was generally used. For instance, Sumara stated that he saw himself more an interpreter than a mentor. Theoretically situating himself and his mentoring in an interpretive framework, Sumara believes that knowing how his advisees relate to their own work as teachers enables him to suggest readings and other practices that will move them along in their thinking. In similar fashion, Spivey took individual differences into account by urging her advisees to take credit for their own thinking and to claim ideas as their own. She emphasized that she did not want to duplicate herself-that is, she did not equate mentoring with cloning. Instead, she believed that each of her advisees should develop a strong sense of what makes him or her unique. </p> <p>Harste also did not object to the term mentoring, but his description of how he interacted with his advisees (and their descriptions of how they related to him) suggested that it did not adequately capture what was happening. In fact, Harste made a point of expanding on the term; in his words, mentoring is "creating the conditions conducive to supporting the development of a community of learners." Perhaps an even more encompassing use of the term mentoring is one that Gadsden used. Based on her experiences at the University of Pennsylvania, Gadsden stated that mentoring, among other things, involved taking responsibility for finding ways to support graduate students financially as they struggled to pay for their education at an Ivy League institution. </p> <p>A second pattern in the site visit data supported the survey finding that professors in literacy teacher education draw from their own experiences in being mentored to shape how they mentor (or as some prefer to say, interact with) their own advisees. In tracing these intergenerational links in mentoring experiences, we found that the professors we interviewed looked very similar in their attempts to reproduce or improve upon how they were mentored. For example, Gadsden, Spivey, and Sumara emphasized the importance of encouraging students to follow their own interests and to work across discourse communities as a way of acquiring new insights into those interests. Green and Dixon did the same; in addition, they looked for ways to mix academic interests with a certain degree of structured socializing between faculty and students. Although Sumara, Spivey, Harste, and Hoffman did not recall this type of socializing as being all that important to their own doctoral programs, or to how they currently interacted with their students, these four professors were similar to the others in their view that mentoring involves the personal (emotional) as well as the academic. </p> <p>Finally, in our cross-case analysis of the site visit data, we found evidence that professors were generally concerned about creating safe spaces in which students can work and grow professionally. Students sensed that concern and were generally in agreement that such spaces did indeed exist for them. At Indiana University, Harste and some of his colleagues worked to create what he called a "thought collective" in which a cycle of reflecting, observing, and theorizing opened up possibilities for taking a stand and being "connected to others who thought like you," or who were concerned with the same issues but approached them differently. The importance of being anchored in one's thinking was Harste's response to the currently popular notion of scholarly eclecticism in reading research. In his words, "eclecticism is a disease curable by taking a position." He was clear that there was no one "right way" of being anchored; in fact, if there was one thing he worried about, it was the fear of developing like-mindedness in a thought collective. He worked hard to keep this from happening by creating spaces in which reflection, observation, and theory building occurred in ever-widening thought collectives (both within and outside the United States), thereby allowing members to rethink their positions and thus outgrow themselves. </p> <p>The four students we interviewed at Indiana University told numerous anecdotes that included examples of how this continuous growth process actually worked. For example, Kathryn saw the thought collective as a way of breaking down traditional hierarchies in higher education-a process that helped her grow from being a student to a colleague. Abe saw it as a mechanism for keeping the dialogue open in groups of people whose views were often diametrically opposed on issues of common concern, and Carrie attributed the success of the thought collective to the fact that it allowed everyone to have "great debates." </p> <p>At the Santa Barbara site, Dixon and Green spoke about an amorphous social collective that they and the students affectionately referred to as "the Blob," named after a movie, and more formally known as the Santa Barbara Classroom Discourse Group. This collective, which was viewed as a support community by the graduate students who elected to be part of it, was considered a safe space for negotiating group roles and relationships. Operating within its structure, Lisa, for instance, came to see mentoring as a two-way process, not something that the professor simply does for the student. A sense of reciprocal caring was also evident in Nadia's impression that the Blob students generated a great deal of support for one another. </p> <p>At Simon Fraser University, Sumara created safe spaces in which his advisees could work and grow professionally through a set of practices that encouraged them to interpret the relationship between their academic studies and their remembered experiences as readers and teachers. Through extensive literary exploration and transformative writing activities, the students entered into what Sumara called "commonplace locations for interpretation." These commonplace locations were the sites where shared reading and responding to literary texts, theoretical texts, and various forms of interpretive response texts became the archival materials from which they drew in critiquing their academic work. According to Danielle, one of Sumara's advisees, these commonplace locations afforded her an opportunity "to see how their theories, their research, the personal aspects of themselves were all coming together...[to produce what she called] a very readable sort of writing." </p> <p>The safe spaces that Gadsden, Hoffman, and Spivey created for their advisees differed from those just described. Unlike their peers at other institutions who were members of thought collectives, the Blob, and commonplace locations for interpretive writing, the students who worked with Gadsden, Hoffman, and Spivey were involved in more traditional mentoring practices. Although they belonged to a larger community of graduate students in their respective institutions, they typically looked to one professor for advice and assurance. The nature of this advice often had a nurturing quality about it, not unlike that involved in some parenting relationships. For instance, Tina, a doctoral student at Louisiana State University, described Spivey as "a mentor [who] has always been there for me." And Ellen, who worked with Hoffman at the University of Texas at Austin, entered doctoral studies with the expectation that she would be mentored in a manner similar to how her father, a professor, had mentored his students. </p> <p>There was also an element of the parenting metaphor present in Wendy and John's descriptions of how Gadsden was always there for them. They especially appreciated her willingness to let them make their own decisions about graduate offerings at Penn and to give them a second chance when those decisions backfired. In sum, regardless of the nature of the safety provided, mentoring that entailed a certain degree of nurturing fulfilled a need seemingly present in both the professors and the students. </p> <hd1 id="AN0002765713-14"> Hruby's fictive representation </hd1> <p>The following is an example of the sort of fictive representation with which Alvermann requested Hruby to experiment. Fictive representations, as we have come to understand them, are research reports that preserve the integrity of the data while employing the tropes and techniques of fiction in the write-up for the benefit and pleasure of the reader. (We explain this technique and its justification at greater length in the last section of the article.) The reader should understand up front that such writing does not adhere to American Psychological Association editorial standards. The narrative is broken at points by centered dots to signify semantic transitions larger than a paragraph but unheaded. Quotes are sometimes captured in quotation marks when brief, indented when longer, or else set in italics when set off as a separate section altogether. In this fashion, italicized text segments can underscore the use of interpolation and parallel structure. The following is abridged from a longer text, and the flow of the plot line and the tension constructed thereby is therefore lost, but the general tone and method of the technique should be sufficiently illustrated for our purposes. </p> <p>The uncommon commonplace book </p> <p>Before you lies open a scrapbook of sorts, a repository for jottings, clippings, notes, quotes, postcards, and snapshots from a recent trip to a west coast university. Here, for instance, you see from the airplane the cozy if cluttered peninsula above which the school is nestled, and the ship-dotted bay sparkling in the sunlight of a spring afternoon. (An optimal shot thanks to the pilot's right-banking, stomach-churning turn in preparation for landing.) Here, too, you see the varied contents of a manila folder: a boarding pass stub with baggage claim sticker; the itinerary of interviews proposed by my host; faxed reservation information and directions to the guest house at which I will stay; even scribbled notes from a preparatory perusing of some of the host's writings, and notations from a strategy session with Donna, my own mentor, for whom I research. And then there is, of course, the heart of the matter: two interview guides, one for the graduate students and one for their mentor. And here--take a look--the result of the excursion: five hefty transcripts of the tape recordings transcribed by a legal secretary in best legal form. Note the ellipses, like loopholes, stitching the narrative together. And inside this slender glove box: a videotape of the whole-group interview shot in the university's video studio. Pocket-crumpled pieces of folded notepaper covered in scrawl. A bev-nap or two. A pair of business cards. And then my journal proper, pages lined with the velour of random musings. </p> <p>Taken singularly such items are suggestive, each piece inciting its own degree of attention, some sufficient to seduce the mind toward epiphany. But it is how they can be taken together to suggest a whole greater than the parts that engages me most. And, indeed, a major theme that will emerge from this site visit is the way in which disjuncted items reconceptualized through intentional or random juxtaposition reveal an interpretive order whose source itself lies open to interpretation. I here share it with you through this, my site visit write-up, my attempt at what my host Dennis Sumara will call a "commonplace book." </p> <p>"I would say I'm an interpreter, you know? That's what I do. And I don't think that I mentor them... I think that my own research and my own teaching I would call an interpretive practice. That's what I always tell my students. That's what I try and tell them about teacher education, like when you're working in a classroom, your job is to be an interpreter with them, not for them. And that's how I understand my role. Now, see, I told you I'd learn something by doing this because I'd never really thought about it." </p> <p>I awake the next morning to sunshine, gull-cry, and the bracing sea-damp flowing in off the Pacific's southerly currents. I inhale intimations of cedar and fir and fishing boats. For a fragrant moment the stresses of my doctoral program drop away, and I am transported beyond my recalcitrant sense of fraudulence as a budding academic. How could I ever have descended to such doubt, I wonder. </p> <p>Lydia, morning-like, arrives early to take me to breakfast. She is one of Dennis Sumara's graduate students. We chat, and eventually strike out for a local grill. Over pancakes and coffee she explains her classroom experiences with Dennis. I listen as intently as I can, but I am slow to envision what she's talking about. </p> <p>"I started to keep this...I really wouldn't call it a research journal, just kind of a thinking journal where I would sit down and just type things that I was worried about or thinking about. And by the time I got to about page one hundred of single-spaced typing and started to read through it, it became quite clear that I was most interested in those rather perplexing transformative moments that occur in classrooms when all of a sudden you're in the middle of talking about a work of literature and you realize that no one's the same for having had that conversation, and never will be again. Even if it's not articulated, you know?... [I started] trying to study those invisible relationships between things, you know? Between readers and texts. But more particularly in school among people who read together. I thought, okay, that's it. That's the moment. That's what I'm interested in." </p> <p>Now here, you see, I've included some snaps of the four female graduate students I interviewed. Here is Danielle, the first interview. Dark, middle-aged, strongaccented mother of an adolescent, sitting in her spare, but orderly, living room. Muted colors, muted shadows, a damp lavender light through sheer drapes descending. Coffee table with requisite coffee table book of art prints. Very neat; no sign of a male presence. She tells me about the recent personal loss that forced her to drop out of the general curriculum and take independent studies instead. And of how then Dennis invited her to join his graduate group doing reading and writing interpretations. </p> <p>[T]hey went around the table just sharing their writing and I remember being completely awed by the whole process because I was impressed at the level of writing of where people had gone. It was so meaningful. It wasn't just dribbles, it was, like, very connected. And I also saw the personal coming through it in a much bigger way than I'd seen it in anybody's writing within those courses to that point. At least if there was, nobody had been willing to share it, you know? But in this case they did. And then I could see how their theories, their research, the personal aspects of themselves were all coming together...I knew this was the kind of writing I wanted to get into myself, you know? And then I was moved by the rapport between everyone in that group and the support that everybody offered to each other. I knew that it came from the kind of tone that Dennis is setting in the classroom for them and also making himself vulnerable in the process, I think. </p> <p>Here's a shot of another grad student, Lois, in her office at the suburban school where she works as a consultant. Late 20s, looks younger, glowing peach-like complexion, from a rural Mennonite community. Energetic. Earnest. With a child she is struggling to understand. And struggling herself as she matures away from the too narrow space her parents and community would allow her. </p> <p>To me a mentor is someone who can look at your skills and your interests and your abilities and draw from you whatever they feel are your strengths and give you scaffolding to move into some areas where those become useful to other people as well as to yourself so you can develop them. Because I think very often...we're hesitant to even say that we are writers or we are teachers or we are whatever. We're shy about being who we are becoming in a sense. So a mentor kind of makes a location for people to be the best that they can be, I think. The best writer you can be and the best teacher you can be. </p> <p>Here's Sandra. Late 30s, maybe. Lanky and angular, mouth pursed. Dark colors, dark denim. Reposed in her elementary school media center. The overt intellectual of the group, it seems, and deep voiced. Difficult, I find, to approach. Disapproving on principle. She is silent in this shot. But later in her car with Dennis, as I eavesdrop from the back seat, she discusses with him their community work with a gay and lesbian studies group, and I am impressed with what strikes me as an example of peer mentoring between them. </p> <p>Oh, and of course, Lydia. My tour guide about town. At the helm of some kind of circus car. My knees tucked up under my chin. Gentler, less severe than the others. But more articulate and descriptive. A better sense of timing, I think. And of fun. Smiles readily. Sensitive to the telling detail. Here we are at a fast food restaurant where she's introducing me to a local specialty: some kind of gravy-drowed, melted cheese-like carbohydrate item--poutine, they call it--the kind of thing you might find delicious if you were a very stoned college senior. Lydia is older than that, but she finds it a funny detail to share, and she's right. I appreciate the gesture, if not the cuisine. </p> <p>"It needs to begin with something that's difficult for you. But then it must become something much bigger and become situated and resituated in bigger questions." </p> <p>When the evening arrives, I've gotten three graduate student interviews on microcassette. I try to regather my energy, my notes. Dennis has rescheduled our interview for a few hours later than originally planned, sensing my scatter. But the extra time doesn't do me much good. I nap fitfully, and then pace around the room. When I finally call down to invite him up, the expectation, the pensivity is high. The exaggerated shadows from the receded ceiling spots are foreboding. The growing downtown night-bustle echoing up from the street portends challenge. </p> <p>Dennis enters the room, smiling. His presence is intense. He is in the prime of his life, clear-eyed, carefully attendant to detail. He speaks with energy and conviction, rapidly, and as he speaks I find myself engaged. I'm not yet sure what to make of him. But I'm doing my best to track the line of his narrative. </p> <p>Dennis begins by talking about the influences that mediated his development as a scholar of education while in graduate school. He cites the work of Palmer, Rosenblatt, Iser, and Gadamer; of Britzman and Lather; Grumet and Pinar. He explains how this was the foundation upon which he developed classroombased writing inquiry practices. He tells of how he requires his students to write "short and very specific phenomenologically oriented narratives of educational experience." Noting that his students as a result of such requests almost always write about life experiences rather than school-oriented ones, he explains how this provides an entry for reading and writing toward what is truly important for them. To request that they write what is important immediately is fruitless because they do not yet know what that is. According to Dennis, they have not done the necessary interpretive groundwork. To get to that knowledge they must read and interpret, and to that end he requires very specific response practices to the readings. </p> <p>Sometimes this requires unconventional teaching strategies, like the time he asked his students to bring in one old shoe. All the shoes were placed anonymously in a pile in the corner, he explains, and then they wrote about that. "And if you can believe it, we ended up in some very interesting theoretical places doing that. But people don't find it intimidating. So [the point is], I never go in and say write about what's important to you, and I never tell them what to write. But I always make sure we have a set of structures that are very prescriptive to write in." Without the scaffolding of what he calls liberating constraints, Dennis maintains, students are at a loss for signification. Such a regimen of prescriptive writing practices works both for undergraduates as well as graduates, Dennis tells me. </p> <p>"I use it a lot with undergraduate teacher education students because they're in a process more than most of us...of identity transformation.... So I'm a firm believer that there needs to be intervention and structure. And the only phrase that I've come up with that I find useful in thinking about this rather ambiguous idea is `liberating constraints.' Because I think that there are some constraints that just constrain people and don't permit them to be creative or productive. And there are some practices that are liberating but are not necessarily productive either. Sometimes consciousness raising is not necessarily a good thing unless you, as the person who facilitates that, are prepared to continue going down the road and creating conditions that will facilitate some kind of transformation or some kind of transition into the next thing. I like liberating constraints because I think it best describes the kind of writing practices we do, and it best describes the way I try to interact with graduate students when I meet with them." </p> <p>Identity transformations, I muse, by way of liberating constraints. A serviceable description of what Dennis does? Too early to say. I'm too impatient. Hangtime, stupid! I glance at my watch. To my surprise, we've already been at this for over an hour.... </p> <p>Repeatedly Dennis interweaves his thoughts on his classroom writing practices with his own development as a literacy scholar and with his current relationship to his graduate advisees. "I don't see any difference between my teaching of a class and my working with a graduate [student] except that I understand the relationship as one that has much larger boundaries. So in a course I know it's over at the end of the semester, and I think about it like that.... With graduate students it doesn't work that way. It's much more complex, and I find I need to be involved on several levels all at once...." </p> <p>Halfway through the second hour, I feel as if my mind were beginning to set. Dennis's blue eyes glisten as his language darts from observation to quip. The acoustics of the room gradually change, as if the fourth wall of the suite, the one behind me, has dropped away. The discourse envelops my powers of discrimination like a narcotic. I am not up to this, I chide myself; I am never going to cut it as an academic. I'm not ready for any "heavy life transformations," as one grad student I've interviewed called them. That'll be it. The next thing you know, Dennis will start in on the heavy life transformation stuff.... </p> <p>"If you're going to do theoretical work, if you're going to work an idea, you don't just add that to your life. Like you don't say okay, I'm going to do all these things and then I'm going to do this. I have found...okay, this is it. I finally talked myself into what I want to say...." </p> <p>Oh, no; this would be too perfect... </p> <p>"I have found that the hardest job about working with students or doing theses or dissertations is helping them to understand that when you do theoretical work, your work, your whole life changes and you'd better be prepared for it. Big things change. Your relationship to your family will change. I mean, your life is configured differently. It doesn't end at 4 o'clock. You will have the need to talk about things constantly. You will be obsessed with an idea. You will not want to make dinner. Whereas you may have thought that the most wonderful thing in the world would be to go sailing for a day, maybe in the middle of your thesis the most wonderful and important thing for you would be to sit at home and to read that book. And people around you may not understand that. So, you need to really develop a relationship with your work to be able to talk about it to other people in ways that will help them to understand. Everything changes in some way." </p> <p>Right. On. Time.... </p> <p>He continues to answer my questions with a response ratio unlike any I will experience throughout the remainder of the mentoring study. Our interview goes on for over 3 hours. Whereupon we leave for dinner at a nearby sushi restaurant, where the conversation continues. When at last I make it back to my room past midnight, I collapse into the thick of the comforter and pass out into a sleep crowded with exotic dreams and the portent of transformation. </p> <hd1 id="AN0002765713-15"> Alvermann's write-over of Hruby's fictive account </hd1> <p>Before me lay the parts--full transcripts of George's interviews with Dennis Sumara and four of his graduate advisees at Simon Fraser University, our response data to that site's video guides, and George's fictive account of the visit. A picture puzzle of sorts. Where to begin? I start, as I typically do when attempting to put puzzles together, with the anchoring pieces. In this case, the key pieces are the graduate students with whom Dennis worked. All women, they were at various stages in their graduate work. Danielle and Lois had completed their classes for the master's degree; Sandra and Lydia had just finished their master's theses, and Lydia was making plans to continue toward a doctoral degree. The women came from diverse backgrounds-conservative, rural Mennonite, liberal, ex-urban middle class, and critical urban feminist. They ranged in age from young adult to middle age, and two were mothers. Three were currently teaching in the schools in the vicinity of Vancouver. All but one (Danielle) had taken one or more seminars with Dennis. </p> <p>The anchoring pieces in place, I am then free to rummage about in the rest of the data. Returning to George's write-up, my attention focuses on the rich descriptions of the women and on the way Dennis seems to float in and out of George's text. I wonder about this and what it might mean for the sense I will try to make of who these women are, how they connect to each other, and the nature of their relationship with Dennis. Initially it occurs to me that this mentoring arrangement is not one that is familiar to me. Thinking back to my time as a doctoral student at Syracuse University, I recall having friends not unlike the four women described here, but Hal Herber, my mentor, was more centrally located in my academic life than Dennis appears to be in these four women's lives. Curious as to how this new form of mentoring might work, I reread each transcript several times, intent at this point on capturing glimpses of how these women interact around a practice that Dennis refers to as the commonplace book. The women refer to this practice as simply "their writings" (or in the case of Lydia and Lois, "their dangerous writings"). </p> <p>Commonplace books were the locations around which Dennis's advisees shared their responses to literary texts, theoretical works, and their own interpretive writings. This practice, with its emphasis on connecting the academic with the personal, created a structure in which the women were encouraged to think theoretically about literacy and literacy teacher education. It also created flexible opportunities for mentoring, both among themselves and between individuals and Dennis. One of the women, Lois, had extended the practice to include the teachers whom she supervised in her position as school district consultant. She described it this way: </p> <p>I've got study groups all over the district now.... And so I sent out an invitation, blanket the district and then tap a few shoulders and say, "Hey, I'm interested in studying [such and such]...you, too?" So people come together out of interest. And then we begin to talk and basically write. We always start with writing now. And we look for things in our writing, and we explore those things. We've got three study groups around later literacy, looking at reading and writing with kids in Grades 4 through...I guess through...oh, about 10.... We do tons and tons of writing.... It's a real source of learning for teachers. It's a little scary, dangerous writing. Teachers are so hesitant to be honest. They don't want to. I had a teacher the other day who said, "I'm going to be honest, I didn't learn how to read until I was 23." Which is kind of a scary thing to say in front of a bunch of teachers (and she is now a teacher). </p> <p>Lydia also talked about the practice of "dangerous writing" in Dennis's seminars and the risks it entailed, even though the women in her group knew each other well. Lydia believed these women were willing to take risks because they knew that writing around commonplace locations was valued, not for its interpretive "correctness," but for its ability to evoke in others the kind of thinking that would move their learning in new directions. In Lydia's words: </p> <p>I think as we got into sharing writing more, [we took] more risks. I mean we all ended up talking about dangerous writing and how, you know, that that's sort of, I think, [what] meshed those writing practices.... Like it wasn't about, you know, this is the interpretation. It was about, okay, you know, here's how I respond to that and here's how I connect to what you said about that. </p> <p>By encouraging students to focus on the connections between their writing and the writing of others, Dennis facilitated commonplace locations for peer mentoring, as well as one-on-one mentoring arrangements that involved a single student and himself. He set up his seminars, independent studies, and research projects in ways that enabled him to get to know his advisees through discussions they had about ideas that came from their commonplace books. He valued coming to know the evolution of their thinking because it allowed him to say, "Okay, I think maybe now it's time to do this. What do you think about that? Or, I think you've done enough of that and it's time for you to do this." </p> <p>Although Lydia, Lois, Sandra, and Danielle had different opinions about the appropriateness of the word mentor to describe their relationships with Dennis (e.g., Danielle associated the term exclusively with supervising student teachers), all four women were in agreement that whatever else Dennis might do, he was an expert in nudging them along to ever higher and higher levels of thinking. Lydia used the metaphor "little village" to signify what she perceived as the "all inclusive and connecting up" relationships that Dennis's style of mentoring facilitated, such as his notion of the commonplace book and the safe haven it created for women who dared to write dangerously. Sandra and Lois described situations in which they used dangerous writing to grow personally and professionally. And Danielle noted the influence of such writing on her willingness to open up her classroom, to change some of its institutional characteristics by allowing a bit of her artistic nature to seep into her teaching practices: </p> <p>I have my own rituals when I write.... I have a lighted, scented candle. I have my symbol that my daughter gave me that I set on my computer, my aura. You know, and I get myself into a certain mind set, oftentimes quiet music going in the background that gets me in a mood where I can make connections and begin to write. So I kind of brought that into the classroom as well. And they [the kids] really responded. They like the kind of warmth that comes with some familiar things. I have a lamp hanging over their reading area.... You know, carpeting in a special area that's just for reading. I have scented candles going in my classroom, and music.... And so it's creating those kinds of conditions for them as well as the openness. </p> <p>In sum, all four women's descriptions of how Dennis created collegial and mutually supportive environments in which they were personally free to write and think--to sample and take what was of value to them, while simultaneously assuming responsibility for the learning of the group--suggest that the relationships literacy teacher educators build around the notion of mentoring are far more diverse than what we had been able to capture in our original mail survey. And while this particular picture of mentoring remains a puzzle only partially completed, we can begin to see from the pieces in place that the notion of building commonplace locations for interpretive thinking is one way of both staying connected and moving in and out of our graduate students' lives. </p> <hd1 id="AN0002765713-16"> Hinge </hd1> <p>By modeling alternative ways of reporting the results from one particular site visit at Simon Fraser University, we hoped to make a case for using a variety of aesthetic devices in writing up qualitative data on mentoring practices in literacy teacher education. We also hoped to model how, in keeping with Dennis Sumara's interpretive practices, it is possible to write a research report in a way that captures the aesthetic nature of his particular form of mentoring and its effects on the lives of four teachers' literate practices. </p> <p>The narrative techniques we used are not new. Over two decades ago, the well-known historian Hayden White (1978) argued for a greater presence in scholarly journals of "impressionistic, expressionistic, surrealistic, and (perhaps) even actionist modes of representation for dramatizing the significance of data" (pp. 47-48). More recently, a number of scholars in the social sciences (Eisner, 1997; Lawrence-Lightfoot &amp; Davis, 1997; Polkinghorne, 1997; Richardson, 1997) have continued to press for a style of academic writing that blurs narrative knowing, socio logical telling, poetry, and film making. Specifically, Polkinghorne (1997) has argued for a narrative format in reporting research that enables researchers to experiment with ways of giving voice to the people they study. It is Polkinghorne's belief that "by changing their voice to storyteller, researchers will also change the way in which the voices of their 'subjects' or participants can be heard" (p. 3). But such hearing may not come easily for reasons we discuss in the last section of the article. </p> <hd id="AN0002765713-17">Panel 3: Reflections on attending to aesthetics in literacy teacher education</hd> <p>In this article we have relied on various aesthetic and reportorial narrative forms for writing up the data we collected on mentoring graduate students in literacy teacher education. Although we acknowledge that such forms are not conventional by the current standards of literacy research, and that some of our readers may not have been sufficiently prepared to make sense of them, we nonetheless believe these forms provided us with a valid means of interpreting and representing our data. The narrative forms we used for reporting our research call for quotations taken verbatim from the transcripts of tape-recorded interviews. Our reported observations of the sites were taken from field notes written during or immediately after the visits. We restricted our narrative manipulations to the representations of the narrator and the narrative voice. This was necessary in order to produce the sort of dramatic tensions (Nabakov, 1980) that make for a dialectic of conflict, which can carry the reader's interest forward in an aesthetic narrative toward a resolution. As a result, it should be understood that the narrator of an aesthetic narrative is not to be confused with the researcher-author. </p> <hd1 id="AN0002765713-18"> Gains and risks </hd1> <p>The use of fictive representation and new journalistic techniques allowed this particular research dyad, one which is also a mentoring dyad and therefore beyond objectivist redemption, to report its research findings in something other than the traditional format. By telling the story of each site visit to one another using different narrative forms, we express our own story as well. Rather than categorically and woodenly listing what we imagine our positioned biases and socially constructed perceptual limitations to be, we attempt to express these research constraints integrally as part of a crafted report. </p> <p>We try our best to show rather than tell the story of our research, and tell-on rather than tell-of our reportorial perspectives. Granted that this is often done with the interpretive wisdom of hindsight, we nonetheless feel it presents a subtle and nuanced conceptual layering of experience. Using aesthetic narrative forms, then, is not a confounding of reality; rather, it is exemplary of the processes by which we construct realities about the mentoring process in literacy teacher education. Such construction requires that we ground our experience not only with conceptual and theoretical bases, but also with our visceral and emotional conditions. Aesthetic narratives allow us to report on just such bases and conditions and the way in which these mediate our understandings. </p> <p>The use of fictive representation in writing up our data allowed us to capture vividly that which would otherwise have remained unspoken and been lost in our personal experience at each site. It also enabled us to use metaphorical and evocative language in ways that captured the participants' personalities and accounted for what they gave to, and took from, the mentoring process. Using language to vivify this process, as Barone and Eisner (1998) reminded us, is still far too uncommon in the teacher education literature. And, we would venture to say, such an absence marks the field of literacy education as well. </p> <p>Other gains were also noted. For example, using aesthetic forms of writing to report the results of the six site visits provided us with a means to communicate the artfulness and creativity involved in effective mentoring practices. At the same time, it drew attention to certain dilemmas in mentoring, such as the one Sumara identified in his interview with Hruby. Concerned that in the past his own attempts at consciousness raising--both through advising and in literacy education courses--had often failed to prepare individuals sufficiently for the transitions and transformations he expected of them, Sumara had developed fairly elaborate scaffolding practices, which he referred to as liberating constraints. These practices, which enabled students to grow in their understanding of themselves and others through highly interpretive writing strategies, led to an effective and creative form of comentoring (Mullen, 1997). They also led to an increased awareness of how personal narratives that are phenomenologically grounded can make theorizing about one's educational experiences a less intimidating and formal task than one might otherwise have imagined. </p> <p>But narrative technique is not just the swapping of stories and anecdotes. Its end point is the construction of nuanced, often literary, narrative representations open to complex, transactional, and social interpretations. Pioneering work by Eisner (1988), Lawrence-Lightfoot and Davis (1997), Richardson (1993), Tierney (1993), and many others have inspired our own efforts. However, we grant that we have much further to go toward both securing this currently plank-loose and wobbly methodological scaffold and reassuring the doubts of the larger research community. </p> <p>Although we have found the collective interpretation made possible by a narrative approach gratifying, and the use of aesthetic narrative forms and new journalistic techniques enlightening, there are serious risks in this sort of methodology. In Interpretive Ethnography: Ethnographic Practices for the 21st Century, Denzin (1997) pointed out the dangers of new journalistic and fictive approaches, and he gives a pair of chillingly detailed examples of how things can go wrong. More recently, there has been an academic uproar over reports that the testimonial of Nobel Peace Prize recipient Rigoberta Menchu was partially fabricated (Preston, 1999; Rohter, 1998). </p> <p>While these cautionary tales are worth bearing in mind, we believe the problems they exemplify have little to do with the mode of data representation these writers chose, but rather with the integrity of the data itself, or with the integrity of the authors' methodological assertions. Even the construction of composite characters (Denzin, 1997) would fail to be problematic provided the writer was explicit about using such a technique and convincing in his or her justification for using it. To not do so was quite simply to falsify, to misrepresent. But such tortured uses of narrative are abuses of representational ethics, not of representational technique. </p> <p>The more serious risk we face using these representational methods is that we may lose an important segment of our intended audience. Even as the use of fictive tropes and narrative technique makes our research available to the broader community of educated nonspecialists--the student, the teacher, the citizen--such devices may serve to cut us off from the more insular community of literacy researchers. As Eisner (1993) has noted, research that would make use of aesthetic or literary techniques requires a readership familiar and conversant with such techniques. </p> <hd1 id="AN0002765713-19"> Increased experimentation in reporting research anticipated in the 21st century </hd1> <p>The opening up of publication venues to include writing that makes use of various forms of aesthetic narrative has already begun (Alvermann, Commeyras, Young, Randall, &amp; Hinson, 1997; Lawrence-Lightfoot &amp; Davis, 1997; Rapp Ruddell, in press; St. Pierre, 1997). Examples specific to mentoring in teacher education, though limited in number, include Stansell's (1997) autobiographical account of his journey from being a graduate student mentee to becoming a mentor himself, and Jipson and Munro's (1997) reconstructed version of a taped conversation between themselves (a professor and her former doctoral advisee). </p> <p>In the latter example, Jipson and Munro (1997) use fragments from 7 hours of taped dialogue of their evolving relationship (since Munro graduated) to construct a new dialogue--one that is a pasticcio of thematically related fragments from the original conversation. The result is a research report reminiscent of the filmscript of Thelma and Louise, only this time the two women are academics. By embedding their voices in the popular filmscript, Jipson and Munro (like Thelma and Louise) challenge the accepted norms for representing themselves. They also call into question the conventional approaches for reporting research on mentoring within the field of teacher education. </p> <p>Thoughts of new publication venues for reporting research that makes use of various forms of the aesthetic narrative inevitably call to mind Eisner's (1997) warning against substituting creativity and cleverness for substance. His advice-that "we need to be our own toughest critics" (p. 9)--seems sound. But the choice is not one between dualistic antitheses. We believe that substance often can and, when possible, should be creatively and cleverly presented. </p> <p>As Joyce (1916/1991) suggested, the aesthetic negotiates a course between the pornographic and the didactic. That is, an aesthetic work must be a presentation no less than a representation; it should be appraised as a thing in and of itself. Put another way, the cleverness of a writer's craft must trim the sail of communicative effort so as to transport the ballast of substance. Such forward movement in narrative is what Gardner (1983) called profluence, a structured effect that Hruby deliberately tried to illustrate in his write-up of the data from interviews conducted at Simon Fraser. </p> <p>We hasten to add that every text, whether primarily informational or aesthetic, makes use of dramatic effects (Kennedy, 1998; Rosenblatt, 1994; Williams, 1997; Wright &amp; Hope, 1996). Although the literacy research community identifies scholarly works by their distanced, judicial, and objectivist tone (thanks to the rhetorical and stylistic devices they employ), the result is no less an emotionally grounded one--a result grounded in confidence, reassurance, familiarity, and security--than that which might be wrought by less traditional modes of scholarly discourse. </p> <p>There is a point, however, where the emotional demands for confidence, reassurance, familiarity, and security--the current emotional demands of academic writing--become deadening to the development of novel, satisfying, and efficacious insight. Considered in this way, the careful conservatism of scholarship might seem to be anchored to an unreasonable existential timidity. Like a child afraid to be left adrift in the social unpredictability of his or her first day at school, the academic traditionalist may well fret over the impending rhetorical experimentation we foresee in the 21st century. We confess that we are as much at a loss to reassure this hypothetical scholar as we would be to reassure the child. Who knows but that something untoward might happen after all. </p> <p>But we doubt it. We also doubt that reassurance, familiarity, and so forth are particularly facilitative of careful or critical thought (at least not any more so than are novelty, delight, or incitement), or that the latter emotions are any more disruptive of careful or critical thought than the former. Indeed, a case could be made for the dysfunctionalizing somnolence induced by the emotions of safety promoted by the current stylistics of academic writing. And, we suspect at bottom, beneath the insistence on measured clarity and distance (and the emotions of safety such devices are meant to promote), crouches a perhaps unhealthy, or at least unsavory, desire to concretize and enshrine the familiar. Our purpose in this article has been to explore alternative modes of representation that may prove credible for reporting research on mentoring in literacy teacher education-even as they problematize and disrupt our embrace of the familiar. We anticipate more such exploration in the new millennium. </p> <p>PHOTO (BLACK &amp; WHITE): Figure 1; A triptych with three panels </p> <hd id="AN0002765713-20">Figure 2; Le Triptych d'Vie (an explanation)</hd> <hd id="AN0002765713-21">Le Triptych d'Vie</hd> <p>(The Triptych of Life; The Triptych of Water; The Aquarian Triptych) </p> <p>Description: A literary-literacy artifact from the early 21st century depicting the turn of the new millennium with a mythic astrological motif. Specifically depicts the passing of the Age of Pisces (represented by a fish--sometimes two--a lower vertebrate life form, unconsciously aswim through the waters of life), and the ascension of the Age of Aquarius (represented by a human being, a higher vertebrate life form, hoisting an urn to the shoulder, often depicted with the urn tilted to allow the waters of life to pour forth). </p> <p>The left panel: Aquarius vainly attempts to account for all the fish in the sea. </p> <p>The center panel: Upper section: Aquarius convinces the fisher folk to throw down their nets. </p> <p>Middle section: The fisher folk wade in, partake of the water, and are transformed. </p> <p>Lower section: Relief and rejoicing among the fishes. </p> <p>The right panel: Aquarius triumphant, cloaked in Van Heusen, stepping forth from the water, urn in hand, forever replenishing. </p> <p>Roundel--Translated: "In the particular resides the general" (Lawrence-Lightfoot &amp; Davis, 1997, p. 14). </p> <p>Interpretation: Strict interpretations have taken the motif as a metaphor for the breakthrough achievements of the life sciences during the 21st century, but more comprehensive assessments extend the metaphor to include the advances in the social and information sciences, as well as in the humanities. Still others interpret the motif broadly as representing the development of literacy and the flowing of the life-giving wisdom it provides. </p> <hd1 id="AN0002765713-22"> REFERENCES </hd1> <p>ALLEN, T.D., RUSSELL, J.E., &amp; MAETZKE, S.B. (1997). Formal peer mentoring: Factors related to proteges' satisfaction and willingess to mentor others. Group &amp; Organization Management, 22, 488-507. </p> <p>ALVERMANN, D.E., COMMEYRAS, M., YOUNG, J.P., RANDALL, S., &amp; HINSON, D. (1997). Interrupting gendered discursive practices in classroom talk about texts: Easy to think about, difficult to do. Journal of Literacy Research, 29, 73-104. </p> <p>ALVERMANN, D.E., &amp; HRUBY, G.G. (1998, April). A survey of literacy teacher educators' mentoring relationships. Paper presented at the meeting of the American Educational Research Association, San Diego, CA. American heritage dictionary of the English language (3rd ed.). (1996). Boston: Houghton Mifflin. </p> <p>BARONE, T., &amp; EISNER, E. (1998). Arts-based educational research. In R. Jaeger (Ed.), Complementary methods of educational research (pp. 73-99). Washington, DC: American Educational Research Association. </p> <p>BAR-YAM, Y. (1997). Dynamics of complex systems. Reading, MA: AddisonWesley. </p> <p>BELCHER, D. (1994). The apprenticeship approach to advanced academic literacy: Graduate students and their mentors. English for Specific Purposes, 13(<reflink idref="bib1" id="ref2">1</reflink>), 23-34. </p> <p>BELENKY, M.F., CLINCHY, B.M., GOLDBERGER, N.R., &amp; TARULE, J. M. (1986). Women's ways of knowing: The development of self, voice, and mind. New York: Basic Books. </p> <p>BLANKEMEYER, M., &amp; WEBER, M.J. (1996). Mentoring: The socialization of graduate students for the 21st century. Journal of Family and Consumer Sciences, 88(<reflink idref="bib3" id="ref3">3</reflink>), 32-36. </p> <p>BRIGGS, C. (1986). Learning how to ask. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. </p> <p>BRODKEY, L. (1989). On the subjects of class and gender in "The literacy letter." College English, 54, 125-141. </p> <p>CLARK, A. (1997). Being there: Putting brain, body and world together again. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. </p> <p>DENZIN, N.K. (1997). Interpretive ethnography: Ethnographic practices for the 21st century. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. </p> <p>EISNER, E.W. (1988). The primacy of experience and the politics of method. Educational Researcher, 17(<reflink idref="bib5" id="ref4">5</reflink>), 15-20. </p> <p>EISNER, E.W. (1993). Forms of understanding and the future of educational research. Educational Researcher, 22(<reflink idref="bib7" id="ref5">7</reflink>), 5-11. </p> <p>EISNER, E.W. (1997). The promise and perils of alternative forms of data representation. Educational Researcher, 26(<reflink idref="bib6" id="ref6">6</reflink>), 4-10. </p> <p>FOWLER, F.J. (1993). Survey research methods (2nd ed.). Newbury Park, CA: Sage. </p> <p>FREIRE, P. (1997). A response. In P. Freire, J.W. Fraser, D. Macedo, T. McKinnon, &amp; W.T. Stokes (Eds.), Mentoring the mentor: A critical dialogue with Paulo Freire (pp. 303-329). New York: Peter Lang. </p> <p>GARDNER, J. (1983). The art of fiction: Notes on craft for young writers. New York: Vintage. </p> <p>GRANT, L., &amp; WARD, K.B. (1992). Mentoring, gender, and publication among social, natural, and physical scientists (Final Report, OERI Grant #R117E0090). Washington, DC: Office of Educational Research and Improvement. (ERIC Document Reproduction Service No. ED 358 004) </p> <p>GRUMET, M. (1991). The politics of personal knowledge. In C. Witherell &amp; N. Noddings (Eds.), Stories lives tell (pp. 67-77). New York: Teachers College Press. </p> <p>HEINRICH, K.T. (1995). Doctoral advisement relationships between women: On friendship and betrayal. Journal of Higher Education, 66, 447-469. </p> <p>HOOKS, B. (1990). Yearning: Race, gender, and cultural politics. Boston: South End Press. </p> <p>INTERNATIONAL READING ASSOCIATION. (1995). Graduate programs &amp; faculty in reading (5th ed.). Newark, DE: Author. </p> <p>JIPSON, J.A., &amp; MUNRO, P. (1997). Deconstructing wo/mentoring. In J.A. Jipson &amp; N. Paley (Eds.), Daredevil research (pp. 201-217). New York: Peter Lang. </p> <p>JOYCE, J. (1991). Portrait of the artist as a young man. New York: New American Library. (Original work published 1916). </p> <p>KALTON, G. (1983). Introduction to survey sampling. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. </p> <p>KEGAN, R. (1982). The evolving self: Problem and process in human development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. </p> <p>KEMP, A.W. (1997). The unbroken circle: Teachers mentoring students mentoring teachers. In C.A. Mullen, M.D. Cox, C.K. Boettcher, &amp; D.S. Adoue (Eds.), Breaking the circle of one: Redefining mentorship in the lives and writings of educators (pp. 21-33). New York: Peter Lang. </p> <p>KENNEDY, G.A. (1998). Comparative rhetoric: An historical and crosscultural introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. </p> <p>KRAM, K.E. (1985). Mentoring at work: Developmental relationships in organization life. Glenview, IL: Scott Foresman. </p> <p>LATHER, P. (1991). Getting smart. New York: Routledge. </p> <p>LAWRENCE-LIGHTFOOT, S. (1997). A view of the whole: Origins and purposes. In S. Lawrence-Lightfoot &amp; J.H. Davis (Eds.), The art and science of portraiture (pp. 1-16). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. </p> <p>LAWRENCE-LIGHTFOOT, S., &amp; DAVIS, J.H. (1997). The art and science of portraiture. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. </p> <p>LUNA, G., &amp; CULLEN, D.L. (1995). Empowering the faculty: Mentoring redirected and renewed (ASHE-ERIC Higher Education Report No. 3). Washington, DC: George Washington University. </p> <p>MACEDO, D. (1997). An anti-method pedagogy. In P. Freire, J.W. Fraser, D. Macedo, T. McKinnon, &amp; W.T. Stokes (Eds.), Mentoring the mentor: A critical dialogue with Paulo Freire (pp. 1-9). New York: Peter Lang. </p> <p>MANGIONE, T.W. (1995). Mail surveys. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. </p> <p>MCQUILLEN, J.S., &amp; IVY, D.K. (1985, April). Student role model selection: A replication. Paper presented at the meeting of the Communication Association, Winston Salem, NC. (ERIC Document Reproduction Service No. 257 161) </p> <p>MERRIAM, S. (1983). Mentors and proteges: A critical review of the literature. Adult Education Quarterly, 3, 161-173. </p> <p>MULLEN, C.A. (1997). Post-sharkdom: An alternative form of mentoring for teacher educators. In C.A. Mullen, M.D. Cox, C.K. Boettcher, &amp; D.S. Adoue (Eds.), Breaking the circle of one: Redefining mentorship in the lives and writings of educators (pp. 145-174). New York: Peter Lang. </p> <p>MULLEN, C.A., &amp; COX, M.D. (1997). Preface: Breaking the circle of one through mentorship. In C.A. Mullen, M.D. Cox, C.K. Boettcher, &amp; D.S. Adoue (Eds.), Breaking the circle of one: Redefining mentorship in the lives and writings of educators (pp. xv-xxiii). New York: Peter Lang. </p> <p>MULLEN, C.A., COX, M.D., BOETTCHER, C.K., &amp; ADOUE, D.S. (Eds.). (1997). Breaking the circle of one: Redefining mentorship in the lives and writings of educators. New York: Peter Lang. </p> <p>NABAKOV, V. (1980). Lectures on literature. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. </p> <p>NESPOR, J., &amp; BARBER, L. (1995). Audience and the politics of narratives. Qualitative Studies in Education, 8, 49-62. </p> <p>POLKINGHORNE, D.E. (1988). Narrative knowing and the human sciences. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. </p> <p>POLKINGHORNE, D.E. (1997). Reporting qualitative research as practice. In W.G. Tierney &amp; Y.S. Lincoln (Eds.), Representation and the text: Re-framing the narrative voice (pp. 3-21). Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. </p> <p>PRESTON, J. (1999, January 21). Guatemala laureate defends "my truth." The New York Times [Online]. Available: <ulink href="http://archives.nytimes.com/">http://archives.nytimes.com/</ulink> archives/ search/fastweb?search </p> <p>RAGINS, B.R., &amp; COTTON, J.L. (1993). Gender and willingness to mentor in organizations. Journal of Management, 19, 97-111. </p> <p>RAPP RUDDELL, M. (in press). Of stand-up comics, statisticians, and storytellers: A closer look at the discourse of literacy research. In T. Shanahan &amp; F. Rodriguez-Brown (Eds.), 48th yearbook of the National Reading Conference. Chicago: National Reading Conference. </p> <p>RICHARDSON, L. (1993). Poetics, dramatics, and transgressive validity: The case of the skipped line. Sociological Quarterly, 35, 695-710. </p> <p>RICHARDSON, L. (1997). Fields of play: Constructing an academic life. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. </p> <p>ROHTER, L. (1998, December 15). Tarnished laureate: A special report; Nobel winner finds her story challenged. The New York Times [Online]. Available: <ulink href="http://archives.nytimes.com/archives/search/fastweb?search">http://archives.nytimes.com/archives/search/fastweb?search</ulink></p> <p>ROSENBLATT, L.M. (1994). The reader, the text, the poem: The transactional theory of the literary work. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. </p> <p>STALKER, J. (1994). Athene in academe: Women mentoring women in the academy. International Journal of Lifelong Education, 13, 361-372. </p> <p>STANSELL, J.C. (1997). Mentors and mentoring: Reflections of a circle with/in circles. In C.A. Mullen, M.D. Cox, C.K. Boettcher, &amp; D.S. Adoue (Eds.), Breaking the circle of one: Redefining mentorship in the lives and writings of educators (pp. 121-144). New York: Peter Lang. </p> <p>ST. PIERRE, E.A. (1997). Methodology in the fold and irruption of transgressive data. Qualitative Studies in Education, 10, 175-189. </p> <p>TIERNEY, W.G. (1993). The cedar closet. Qualitative Studies in Education, 6, 303-314. </p> <p>TOKARCZYK, M.M., &amp; FAY, E.A. (Eds.). (1997). Working-class women in the academy. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press. Webster's new world dictionary of American English (3rd ed.). (1991). New York: Prentice Hall. </p> <p>WHITE, H. (1978). Tropics of discourse. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. </p> <p>WILLIAMS, J.M. (1997). Style: Ten lessons in clarity and grace (5th ed.). New York: Longman. </p> <p>WISEMAN, D.L. (1997). Patterns of mentoring: Weaving teacher educators' career stories. In C.A. Mullen, M.D. Cox, C.K. Boettcher, &amp; D.S. Adoue (Eds.), Breaking the circle of one: Redefining mentorship in the lives and writings of educators (pp. 189-199). New York: Peter Lang. </p> <p>WRIGHT, L., &amp; HOPE, J. (1996). Stylistics: A practical coursebook. London: Routledge. </p> <p>YOUNG, J.P., &amp; ALVERMANN, D.E. (1997). The making of a researcher: A selfstudy of a mentoring relationship. In K. Camperell, B. Hayes, &amp; R. Telfer (Eds.), 17th Yearbook of the American Reading Forum (pp. 113-125). Logan, UT: Utah State University. </p> <p>YUKMAN, L. (1997). Feminism and a discontent. In L. Heywood &amp; J. Drake (Eds.), Third wave agenda (pp. 168-177). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. </p> <aug> <p>By Donna E. Alvermann and George G. Hruby </p> <p></p> <p>Donna E. Alvermann is University of Georgia Research Professor and Professor of Reading Education. Her recent research makes use of alternative forms of data representation and explores the potential of feminist poststructural theory for interpreting gendered literacy practices. Currently, she is using such theory to study critical media literacy in a public library setting with a grant from the Spencer Foundation. She can be contacted at the Department of Reading Education, 309 Aderhold Hall, University of Georgia, Athens, GA 30602-7125, USA, or by e-mail at dalverma@arches.uga.edu </p> <p>George G. Hruby is a doctoral student in Reading Education at the University of Georgia. His current interests are in cultural aesthetics, neuroscience, and ecological, situativist, and socionaturalist explanatory frameworks for individual and collective literacy processes and development. He can be contacted at the Department of Reading Education, 309 Aderhold Hall, University of Georgia, Athens, GA 30602-7125, USA, or by e-mail at geohruby@mindspring.com. </p> </aug> <nolink nlid="nl1" bibid="bib1" firstref="ref1"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl2" bibid="bib3" firstref="ref3"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl3" bibid="bib5" firstref="ref4"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl4" bibid="bib7" firstref="ref5"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl5" bibid="bib6" firstref="ref6"></nolink> |
|---|---|
| Header | DbId: eric DbLabel: ERIC An: EJ598974 AccessLevel: 3 PubType: Academic Journal PubTypeId: academicJournal PreciseRelevancyScore: 0 |
| IllustrationInfo | |
| Items | – Name: Title Label: Title Group: Ti Data: Mentoring and Reporting Research: A Concern for Aesthetics. – Name: Language Label: Language Group: Lang Data: English – Name: Author Label: Authors Group: Au Data: <searchLink fieldCode="AR" term="%22Alvermann%2C+Donna+E%2E%22">Alvermann, Donna E.</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="AR" term="%22Hruby%2C+George+G%2E%22">Hruby, George G.</searchLink> – Name: TitleSource Label: Source Group: Src Data: <searchLink fieldCode="SO" term="%22Reading+Research+Quarterly%22"><i>Reading Research Quarterly</i></searchLink>. Jan-Mar 2000 35(1):46-63. – Name: PeerReviewed Label: Peer Reviewed Group: SrcInfo Data: Y – Name: Pages Label: Page Count Group: Src Data: 18 – Name: DatePubCY Label: Publication Date Group: Date Data: 2000 – Name: TypeDocument Label: Document Type Group: TypDoc Data: Journal Articles<br />Reports - Research – Name: Subject Label: Descriptors Group: Su Data: <searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Data+Interpretation%22">Data Interpretation</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Higher+Education%22">Higher Education</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Interprofessional+Relationship%22">Interprofessional Relationship</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Mentors%22">Mentors</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Preservice+Teacher+Education%22">Preservice Teacher Education</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Professional+Development%22">Professional Development</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Reading+Teachers%22">Reading Teachers</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Research+Methodology%22">Research Methodology</searchLink> – Name: ISSN Label: ISSN Group: ISSN Data: 0034-0553 – Name: Abstract Label: Abstract Group: Ab Data: Presents results of 2 studies on mentoring teacher educators in literacy education. Models alternative ways of representing and evaluating research data. Articulates how these alternative forms of representing data capture the aesthetics of mentoring graduate students in literacy teacher education. Describes the quantitative survey study, qualitative site visits, and the interpretive rationale for attending to aesthetics in reporting research. (RS) – Name: Note Label: Notes Group: Note Data: Special Issue: Envisioning the Future of Literacy. – Name: CodeSource Label: Journal Code Group: SrcInfo Data: <searchLink fieldCode="JC" term="%22CIJJUL2000%22">CIJJUL2000</searchLink> – Name: DateEntry Label: Entry Date Group: Date Data: 2000 – Name: AN Label: Accession Number Group: ID Data: EJ598974 |
| PLink | https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&site=eds-live&db=eric&AN=EJ598974 |
| RecordInfo | BibRecord: BibEntity: Languages: – Text: English PhysicalDescription: Pagination: PageCount: 18 StartPage: 46 Subjects: – SubjectFull: Data Interpretation Type: general – SubjectFull: Higher Education Type: general – SubjectFull: Interprofessional Relationship Type: general – SubjectFull: Mentors Type: general – SubjectFull: Preservice Teacher Education Type: general – SubjectFull: Professional Development Type: general – SubjectFull: Reading Teachers Type: general – SubjectFull: Research Methodology Type: general Titles: – TitleFull: Mentoring and Reporting Research: A Concern for Aesthetics. Type: main BibRelationships: HasContributorRelationships: – PersonEntity: Name: NameFull: Alvermann, Donna E. – PersonEntity: Name: NameFull: Hruby, George G. IsPartOfRelationships: – BibEntity: Dates: – D: 01 M: 01 Type: published Y: 2000 Identifiers: – Type: issn-print Value: 0034-0553 Numbering: – Type: volume Value: 35 – Type: issue Value: 1 Titles: – TitleFull: Reading Research Quarterly Type: main |
| ResultId | 1 |
